h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Or even heat -> het, as in 'All het up'

Eat and Meet come from Anglo-Saxon etan and metan. A.S. used a lot of different ways of making past tenses and these have survived into Modern English as irregular verbs.

Treat came into English from Old French traitier, so it would not have originally had a past tense "tret". Verbs adopted into English from other languages in the last 1000 years normally use regular past tenses.

So it appears that "tret" is formed by irregularising the regular "treated". This is a perfectly respectable thing to do. Many irregular words in Modern English were once regular. As old irregular forms get forgotten (wrought for worked, for example), new ones get added (caught was originally catched). In America, the word "dove" is an acceptable past tense of dive, while "snuck" for sneaked is becoming respectable. Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer" is full of words like "clumb" for climbed.

Remind me to introduce you to Notts Derby dialect sometime ( He tret her to a gud....)

How refreshing! Almost anywhere else in the universe, this discussion would be moving toward the view that irregularities should be brutally suppressed, and their supporters killed very slowly. A language is an evolving artwork, created by its speakers. From what you say, Gnomon, I assume you agree?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

"A language is an evolving artwork, created by its speakers"

Absolutely. You will get a lot of support for that view here on the British English thread.

I don't think this is actually a reply. The word just came into my head and I thought I'd like some elucidation (from Ben perhaps?)

from Dutch "soft s**t" (pap as in English and kak=s**t).

Or should that be k*k = s**t?

Of course. That's repaired that synapse. So why are/were fiddlesticks particularly nonsensical?

Possibly because like fruitcake, they start with the letter f? As does a well known four-letter word. In the same vein, my boss calls upon the name of that well known cartoon character, Obelix, when things go wrong.

Thank you again. That one's very near the subject of the original thread of which we may not speak.
The names of the Asterix characters are much funnier in English than any of the other languages I've seen them in (The word we're looking for there is "swank";would that be a conflation of 'swell Yank'?)

Methinks 'swank' is what one would do at that moment of indecision when the proposition 'sink or swim' is tabled and no other remedial action is immediately forthcoming.

The other possibilty is similar to 'snob' a printer's contraction of the phrase 'sans noblise'.


~j~

Any thoughts on "retronym", a term I thought I'd coined myself, but I think I must've picked it up somewhere without realising. A great word.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Would you care to elucidate?

On what it means, I assume? OK:

Once there were guitars. Then the electric guitar was born. Shortly afterward, the retronym 'acoustic guitar' was coined. It refers to an extended or changed original term, changed to distinguish it from newer variants. Another example would be 'analogue ' as 'digital' (or computerised in some sense) equivalents are spawned.

I like the word, but I can't decide if I like the necessity for it. Perhaps I feel the original term should not be the one that has to change, having been around for longer. Or maybe I'm just rambling.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Snail mail is a retronym because it referes to the mail that came before electronic mail.

Alji

I'm not entirely sure adding extra discriminating words really justifies a specific term.

However, as examples of the phenomenon, I guess 'real ale' and 'organic farming' would count.

Not to mention George Formby senior whose more famous offspring held the title George Formby.

And closer to home, Zaphod Beeblebrox whose forebears were Zaphod Beeblebrox II, III, IV, because of an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine.

My home page claims that the last posting on this thread appeared 15 minutes ago, but when I open this page, the latest entry I can find claims to be nine hours old. This has been happening to me for a few days now. Is it just me, or has the h2g2 server got a problem?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

It's not just you. See :-

F48000?thread=167624?thread=&skip=0&show=20

Retronyms! Love it!
Many of the examples that first came to mind walked a fine line between oxymorons and redundancies.
But I thought of a few others:

Manual typewriter.
Hand drill.
Rotary dial.
Smooth bore cannon.
Sailing ship.
Horse-drawn engine.

One of the earliest examples might be 'nouveau rich'.
Or would it be 'old money'?

~j~